ENGL 836 Schuler Dominican Republic & Credibility   Tags: dominican_republic, junot_diaz, oscar_wao, website_credibility, website_evaluation  

1. What is your purpose? Are you planning a trip there, or are you doing academic research?

2. What's the domain?
.com? .org? .gov? .edu? .net?

3. Who is the author? What are his/her credentials (example: professor, expert in this field)

4. Is there an "about us" or "about" page? If so, does the information on this "about us" page make you trust the information more or less?

5. Is there advertising? Cartoon characters? What about the formatting? Spelling and punctuation?

6. What is the website's bias (interested perspective)? Is this website for increasing tourism? For encouraging investments? 

• Apply these 6 question to this website.
• Try it again with this second website.  
• What about Wikipedia's information on the Dominican Republic?
• Wikipedia is a great diving board, but it's not the swimming pool.  

Google Trick:

1. advanced search
2. domain: .edu (at the bottom)
Warning: not everything with an .edu is writing by a professor. When might you use a student's information?

Baseball Comparison:

Compare this information  to this information.
Describe differences and explain why one is more appropriate for college research. 

You can find many websites about the Dominican Republic. How do you decide which ones to trust? Today, we will learn how to gauge the credibility, or trustworthiness, of websites.

Our college's esteemed Professor Terzaki shares these words of wisdom: "Be skeptical, but don't be paranoid!"

Gale Virtual Reference Library Type "Dominican Republic" in the search box and get back lots of encyclopedia articles from online encyclopedias.

CountryWatch Wealth of information, although the history section seems to be cut off in the 1800s.

Ethnic Newswatch  Ethnic and minority newspapers in Spanish and English.

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